The present invention relates to mail processing apparatus and more particularly to apparatus for sorting mail according to whether the address characters of the mail are printed or hand-written.
Mail having address characters which are printed are further sorted with respect to ZIP codes by an optical character reader (OCR), while mail determined to have handwritten characters are sorted with respect to ZIP codes by hand.
Mail sorting machines sort mail according to the address, using pattern recognition methods. Pattern recognition methods are effective for printed characters, but not effective for hand-written characters. Therefore, only mail with printed address characters can be supplied to mail sorting machines because the mail sorting machines are required to accurately recognize address characters.